Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Glory vs. Honor

It occasionally strikes me as
being a bit pretentious to distinguish within an argument amongst terms which are
used interchangeably in everyday speech—but my goodness, isn’t it helpful?(And in English we have enough words to do it
too.)And one does want a way to
distinguish between the gods of Olympus and the heroes of the same world; for
after all, though the gods don’t always seem admirable—at least from a modern
western standpoint—they are admired.Clearly, then we want a way to distinguish between the two kinds of
awesomeness in play in the Greek world.

The first possibility that came
to mind—because, as usual, it had cropped up in my recent reading—was the
distinction which Aquinas purportedly makes, somewhere, between glory and
honor.(I say “purportedly” and “somewhere”
because despite the fact that I usually mark these astonishing passages, I seem
not to have done so on this particular occasion, and Google is of no help in
tracking down the reference.There is
thus a possibility, albeit a slim one, that I am making this up.At any rate …)Aquinas, though he generally uses the terms “glory”
and “honor” interchangeably, at one point makes a distinction between what
those terms signify in describing our attitude towards God.We honor God, says Aquinas, for who He is, but we give Him glory for what He
has done.

And that, interestingly enough,
strikes me as very close to the difference between the way we (or at any rate,
I) feel about the Greek gods and heroes.A certain amount of respect goes to the gods just because of what they are.You can shift shape? smash mortals with
lightning bolts? remain ever-young with magical drinks?Cool beans.Respect.Or, in Aquinas’s lingo,
honor.Mostly because I would prefer not
to be smashed by a lightning bolt.

But it’s a very different feeling
than the feeling one has for the heroes.Killing Hector or a Cyclops takes a certain amount of grit and effort
(magical armor and sleeping drugs notwithstanding); and any human who can pull
that off earns my respect in a completely different sense—they deserve, in other
words, the glory they receive.

This is not to say that the gods
never pull off any impressive stunts in their Olympian careers, or that human
beings never give them “glory” in the specialized sense with which I’m here
concerned.But that strikes me as a
somewhat rarer sort of thing than the “honor” which the gods typically receive;
and it tends to be the fruit of particular personal patronages involving
particular personal helps (e.g., Athena’s help and patronage of Odysseus).